He spotted the field agent standing at the edge of the gate area. Vince Walsh. According to the file, he was fifty-two with a solid record. He would retire in June. He looked an unhealthy sixty-two. His complexion was the color of modeling clay, and gravity had pulled the flesh of his face down, leaving deep crevices in his cheeks and across his forehead. He had the look of a man with too much stress in his life and no way out but a heart attack. He had the look of a man who would rather have been doing something other than picking up some hotshot mind hunter from Quantico.
Quinn forced his energy level up along with the corners of his mouth. React accordingly: look apologetic, nonaggressive, nonthreatening; just a touch of friendliness, but not overly familiar. His shoulders were drooping naturally with fatigue; he didn't bother to square them up. “You're Walsh?”
“You're Quinn,” Walsh declared flatly as Quinn started to pull his ID from the interior pocket of his suit coat. “Got luggage?”
“Just what you see.” A bulging garment bag that exceeded regulation carry-on dimensions and a briefcase weighed down with a laptop computer and a ream of paperwork. Walsh made no offer to take either.
“I appreciate the ride,” Quinn said as they started down the concourse. “It's the quickest way for me to get right in the game. Eliminates me driving around lost for an hour.”
“Fine.”
Fine. Not a great start, but there it was. He'd work the guy around as they went. The important thing here was to hit the ground running. The case was the priority. Always the case. One after another, on top of another, with another and another around the bend . . . The fatigue shuddered down through him, giving his stomach a kick as it went.
They walked in silence to the main terminal, took the elevator up one floor, and crossed over the street to the parking ramp where Walsh had left his Taurus parked illegally in a handicapped slot. Quinn dumped his stuff in the trunk and sat back for the ride out to the highway. Cigarette smoke had permeated the car's interior and gave the beige upholstery the same gray cast as the car's driver.
Walsh reached for a pack of Chesterfields as they hit state highway five. He hooked his lip over the cigarette and pulled it out of the pack. “You mind?”
He flicked a lighter without waiting for a reply.
Quinn cracked the window a slit. “It's your car.”
“For seven more months.” He lit up, sucked in a lungful of tar and nicotine, and stifled a cough. “Christ, I can't shake this damn cold.”
“Filthy weather,” Quinn offered. Or lung cancer.
The sky seemed to press down over Minneapolis like an anvil. Rain and forty-three degrees. All vegetation had gone dormant or had died and would stay that way until spring—which he suspected was a depressingly long way off in this place. At least in Virginia there were signs of life by March.
“Could be worse,” Walsh said. “Could be a goddamn blizzard. Had one here on Halloween a few years back. What a mess. Must have been ten feet of snow that winter and it wasn't gone till May. I hate this place.”
Quinn didn't ask why he stayed. He didn't want to hear the common litany against the Bureau or the common complaints of the unhappily married man with in-laws in the vicinity, or any other reason a man like Walsh hated his life. He had his own problems—which Vince Walsh would not want to hear about either. “There's no such place as Utopia, Vince.”
“Yeah, well, Scottsdale comes close enough. I never want to be cold again as long as I live. Come June, I'm out of here. Out of this place. Out of this thankless job.”
He glanced at Quinn with suspicion, as if he figured him for some Bureau stoolie who would be on the phone to the special agent in charge the second he was left alone.
“The job can wear on a man,” Quinn commiserated. “The politics is what gets to me,” he said, picking the hot nerve with unerring accuracy. “Working in the field, you get it from both ends—the locals and the Bureau.”
“That's a fact. I wish to hell I could have blown out of here for good yesterday. This case is gonna be nothing but one kick in the ass after another.”
“Has that started already?”
“You're here, aren't you?”
Walsh picked up a file folder from the seat between them and handed it over. “The crime scene photos. Knock yourself out.”
Quinn took the file without taking his dark eyes off Walsh. “You have a problem with me being here, Vince?” he asked bluntly, softening the question with an expression that was part I'm-your-buddy smile, part confusion that he didn't feel. He'd been in this situation so many times, he knew every possible reaction to his arrival on the scene: genuine welcome, hypocritical welcome, cloaked annoyance, open hostility. Walsh was a number three who would have claimed he said exactly what he thought.
“Hell no,” he said at last. “If we don't nail this scumbag ASAP, we're all gonna be running around with targets on our backs. I got no problem with you having a bigger one than me.”
“It's still your case. I'm here as support.”
“Funny. I said the same thing to the homicide lieutenant.”
Quinn said nothing, already starting to lay out a team strategy in his mind. It looked like he might have to work around Walsh, although it seemed unlikely that the ASAC (assistant special agent in charge) here would have assigned a less than stellar agent to this case. If Peter Bondurant could make top dogs in Washington bark, the locals weren't apt to antagonize the man. According to the faxes, Walsh had a solid rep that spanned a lot of years. Maybe a few too many years, a few too many cases, a few too many political games.
Quinn already had a picture of the political situation here. The body count was three—just meeting the official standard to be considered serial murders. Ordinarily he would have been consulted by phone at this stage—if he was consulted at all. In his experience, locals usually tried to handle this kind of thing themselves until they were slightly deeper in dead bodies. And with a caseload of eighty-five, he had to prioritize worst to least. A three-murder case rarely made his travel schedule. His physical presence here seemed unnecessary—which aggravated his frustration and his exhaustion. He closed his eyes for two seconds, reining the feelings back into their corral.
“Your Mr. Bondurant has friends in very high places,” he said. “What's the story with him?”
“He's your basic nine-hundred-pound gorilla. Owns a computer outfit that has a lot of defense contracts—Paragon. He's been making noises about moving it out of state, which has the governor and every other politician in the state lining up to kiss his ass. They say he's worth a billion dollars or more.”
“Have you met him?”
“No. He didn't bother to go through our office to get to you. I hear he went straight to the top.”
And in a matter of hours the FBI had Quinn on a plane to Minneapolis. No consideration to the normal assignment of cases by region. No consideration to the cases he had ongoing. None of the usual bureaucratic bullshit entanglements over travel authorizations.
He wondered sourly if Bondurant had asked for him by name. He'd been in the spotlight a hell of a lot in the last year. Not by his own choosing. The press liked his image. He fit their profile of what a special agent from the Investigative Support Unit should look like: athletic, square-jawed, dark, intense. He took a good picture, looked good on television, George Clooney would play him in the movies. Some days the image was useful. Some days he found it amusing. More and more it was just a pain in the ass.